Upper Back Pain

Upper Back Pain

Upper back pain has many causes that may vary from vertebral misalignment, or damage bulging, damaged discs, arthritis sports injuries, work related injuries etc., however; one cause often overlooked is the impact of clenching and grinding of the teeth. This makes no sense to most people, after all; the jaw muscles are in one side of the body, and below on the opposite side of the body are the shoulder and neck muscles, and upper back muscles.

First we have to understand that the body has a lot of musculature and connective tissue throughout, and how can one side relate to the other? And how can they be connected? This became eminently clear to me a number of years ago when I tore some cartilage in my rib cage called Intercostal Chondritis. It was extremely painful and I felt like I was having a heart attack as it was right above my heart. The pain was intense, but by the end of the day the pain had migrated from just over my heart to the same spot in my back, 180° on the backside. What happened was a response to the intense pain on one side, was a contraction on the other. I called it a musculoskeletal balancing reflex. The same thing happened in reverse when I damaged some connective tissue in my Mid-back vertebra and the next day, my abdomen spasmed so hard that it ruptured a muscle in my abdomen.

…Now returning to clenching, grinding, and upper back pain. When the jaw muscles contract with significant force, there is a skeletal balancing, and the shoulders and neck can also tighten. I have suffered from and experienced clenching and grinding myself. Typically I would have problems with my jaw, shoulder, neck, or headaches, and I wore a device that became extremely worn, the smaller and more worn it got, the more problems I had with pain that eventually went into my upper back, so much so that I had my wife rub her elbow between my shoulder blade, to try to work out the muscle contraction. I knew my device was worn and I needed a new one. Once I received a new constructed device, I woke up the next morning, amazed and remarking about my lack of pain.

I have been a practicing dentist for over 40 years, but I'm also a patient, as I too suffer from these problems. My passion in this area as both a dentist and a patient has encouraged me to create a device that I believe is the best device to treat these problems.

Most appliances to treat these maladies, poster pads, horseshoes, or various forms of plastic between the teeth have no ability to treat the problem at the source. The product I created GrindReliefN is smaller, easier to wear and has a central bar which concentrates bite forces at the upper and lower mid-line. This creates a nerve stimulus to re-program the muscles and reduce muscle activity by 70% or more. This device has been by far the most wearable and effective in treating these problems than I have ever seen.

An easy test can demonstrate how and why this works. Take a simple pencil, put it between your back teeth, then take the same pencil put it between your upper and lower front teeth, and at the mid-line, you can bite right through the pencil with your back teeth but you are not able to exert nearly as much pressure with the front teeth. Problems with clenching and grinding are getting to be epidemic in the stressful world we live in. I Believe GrindReliefN provides the most effective and affordable treatment for these problems.

More information can be found at GrindReliefN.com, and a link to a Fox 2 news short video gives much more information.